Multiple Religious Belonging -- Possible?

Wow, so it's been a long time since I've posted on this blog. Indeed, I've been swamped with the rigors and time constraints of dissertation writing. And some may be happy to know that I'm finally on the last chapter and almost halfway done with it! It'll definitely be complete by the end of July.

Anyway, as I've been diligently working on my last chapter concerned with Buddhist-Christian dialogue and transformation, there has been one particular issue that, while extremely engaging, isn't something I'm prepared to tackle in the diss itself: multiple religious belonging. That is, during my investigations into people's expressions of how they have learned from other religious traditions and how other religions have influenced their self-understanding as a Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, or whatever, what I've found is that quite a few (especially Christians in the Buddhist-Christian encounters) have described themselves as having been so impacted that they "belong" not only to one tradition but, to some extent, the other tradition as well.

This raises about a million questions: What is meant by "belonging? Is it even possible to truly or honestly claim to be both Christian and Buddhist or some other combination? And how could a situation like this not lead to a kind of misappropriation or misuse of one or more religions or lead to a dispelling of the distinct uniqueness of each tradition? Nonetheless, I want to suggest a different linguistic universe to discuss this and how it might be possible to genuinely and authentically make this kind of claim while not denigrating the richness and uniqueness of any religion or heritage.

Before giving my own basic understanding of the issue, I want to mention that there is a growing amount of scholarship on this very theme. See Many Mansions: Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity (Wipf & Stock, 2002), which is edited by Catherine Cornille and offers a number of Christian perspectives on the complexities of the problems that come with this topic. Also see the academic articles Peter C. Phan, "Multiple Religious Belonging: Opportunities and Challenges for Theology and Church," Theological Studies (2003), which argues for the possibility for multiple religious belonging through an "inclusive pluralism," and Gideon Goosen, "An Empirical Study of Dual Religious Belonging," Journal for Empirical Theology (2007), which presents a rather convincing case that such a phenomenon does, in fact, exist in the world.

My own understanding has been influenced significantly by a German theologian and scholar of religion teaching at the University of Muenster -- Perry Schmidt-Leukel. His work sets out the possibility of multiple religious belonging grounded in an interpretation of religion and religious experience as fundamentally and primarily (though not exclusively) individual. This means that, while we are communal, social beings, our "religiosity" is basically a personal, individual issue. Along with this claim, he maintains a re-conceptualization of the language used to speak of this issue. Rather than speaking of "multiple religious belonging," which suggests that religions are these static, unchanging, institutions to which we adhere and are either "in" or "out," we ought to speak of "multiple religious identity," since it's more a concern about the individual's personal experience and expression of religiosity that is grounded in engagement with the continually developing and dynamically evolving social networks of meaning we call "religions."

With this framework we can speak of one's individual religious identity being composed of religious and spiritual elements experienced from more than one tradition or heritage. Indeed, I'm not only a husband to my wife, but also a brother to my sister and a son to my parents; so my identity is made up of a plurality of relational ingredients. This is also the case concerning individual religious identity. My identity is primarily shaped by the Christian tradition, and also more than one denomination of belief and practice within the Christian tradition (Unity, Episcopal Church, etc.), but my identity is also shaped and influenced by my interactions and exchanges with Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and others with whom I've come into contact and have found religious elements that I've found to be good, true and beautiful in their worldview. One is able to integrate and incorporate elements from the religious other into one's individual religious identity so that one might truthfully and authentically speak of having a multiple religious identity or worldview.


So it is by virtue of a transformation by integration of religious otherness and difference that a notion of multiple religious identity - not belonging - is possible.


Peace.